Professors vs. Patriotism
Is higher education incompatible with patriotism? That's the startling question posed by a recent symposium sponsored by the NAS. The symposium is detailed in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). A description of the symposium content follows:
The issue includes a symposium titled, "Is Higher Education Compatible With Patriotism," which is based on a conference held in May at the national conference of the National Association of Scholars. In her introduction to the symposium, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that since the 1960s, people both inside and outside the academy have become increasingly adversarial to "such bourgeois values as ... family, community, country."
All the while continuing to have their own families, become prominent in their own communities, and be supported by the taxpayers in their communities and their country. I suppose just because one is utterly dependent on "bourgeouis values," that's no reason not to condemn them.
Walter Berns, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, picks up that thread and traces it back to England. He writes that "what began in 19th-century Britain as a serious critique of the new liberal democracy became, in 20th-century America, a contemptuous 'bourgeois bashing,' almost a way of life for some of our campus radicals." He gives examples of people in academic circles who have an antipathy to shows of patriotism. After a Fourth of July celebration, Mr. Berns encountered "the wife of an economics professor" who, "when asked if she had enjoyed the fireworks, replied, 'Yes, but I could have done without all the flag-waving.'"
On a Fourth of July celebration, no less. Here's a tip - if you hate our flag, please stay inside during our patriotic holidays and do all the rest of us a favor, okay? Oh, and you get three guesses as to which economic models her husband espouses - and the first two don't count.
Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, sees little conflict between higher education and patriotism, answering the symposium's question with "'Yes.' Yes, in thunder." He says that patriotism involves debate and clear reasoning, and that it includes asking provocative questions. "Patriotism," he observes, "is not obedience."
Yay, Todd - in thunder! He won a soft spot in my heart last fall with his brave essay denouncing the anti-war radicals - published in Mother Jones, no less. He's obviously unafraid to state outright the ideas that many in higher education either stupidly disbelieve or are too afraid to support.
In the final essay, William A. Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park School of Public Affairs, writes that he hopes "higher education can help foster a sober and moderate patriotism." This kind of patriotism, he says, involves "giving one's country the benefit of the doubt, exploring benign interpretations of controversial policies before concluding that more malign views are correct" but not "suspending critical judgment or withholding criticism."
The "more malign views" are, of course, the stock in trade for history professors who ignore the liberation of Iraq and focus on lost antiques, or Yale professors who organized a "teach-in" during the war that featured naked anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, or speech professors who force students to write anti-war letters to the President. None of these academics have the slightest interest in moderation, or in giving American the benefit of the doubt.
Luckily, the pendulum has begun to swing back, and college students are showing less interest in the radical politics of their professors:
[UC-Berkeley]senior faculty members here say the student population is not nearly as political or liberal as it once was.
"Compared to the 1960s," said Berkeley political science professor Henry E. Brady, "a lot of students these days are really more focused on finding a path into the system. There is no military draft now and no war, like Vietnam, going on and on and on. The experience of this generation is that war is brief with not many people killed -- certainly not anyone they know."
In September, Brady and a fellow political scientist, Merill Shanks, published a national survey showing that in many areas -- notably those involving religion and abortion -- today's college students are more conservative than their parents...
The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.
"As a general rule," said [University Librarian Thomas] Leonard, "the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically." In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. "I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus," Leonard said. "There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older."
Wait, I thought the idea of "community" was too bourgeois for the faculty members. If they hate the community, and don't have the support of the students, who's left to listen to their twitty theories?